The Right to Privacy

The more technological advanced we become, the higher the degree the potential exists for an invasion of our privacy. Imagine how difficult it must have been for people’s personal information to get stolen—10,000 years ago.

We now live in a world where someone half-way around it from you can nab your most personal information in seconds.

Our right to privacy is just as strong now as it ever was, despite the ease at which criminals and snoops can get your personal data.

Famed attorney and associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court Louis Brandeis was a champion of a person’s right to privacy, and defined the right of a person “to be let alone” as “the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men.”

To keep up with the increasing ease of stealing a person’s data, legal remedies and privacy enabling software have been developed.

The Internet is infested with spammers, scammers, and hackers. Do you know that these spammers and hackers can easily monitor your online activities and steal your personal data like credit card information and passwords?

Even your Internet Service Provider (ISP) spies on you! They monitor, track, and keep a record of all your web activities. The websites you visit, the software you download, your online purchases, and everything else are recorded and saved by your ISP.

If this bothers you, you now have options available to protect your privacy and identity. Just download and use Hotspot Shield software. It acts as an IP hider to mask or change your IP address and protect your privacy, while securing your Web browsing session at the same time.

“THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY,” by Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, appeared in the Harvard Law Review in December of 1890.

From that are derived six applicable limitations:

1. “The right to privacy does not prohibit any publication of matter which is of public or general interest.” Warren and Brandeis give elaboration on this exception to the right to privacy by stating:

In general, then, the matters of which the publication should be repressed may be described as those which concern the private life, habits, acts, and relations of an individual, and have no legitimate connection with his fitness for a public office which he seeks or for which he is suggested, . . . and have no legitimate relation to or bearing upon any act done by him in a public or quasi public capacity.

2. The right to privacy does not prohibit the communication of any matter, though in its nature private, when the publication is made under circumstances which would render it a privileged communication according to the law of slander and libel.

3. The law would probably not grant any redress for the invasion of privacy by oral publication in the absence of special damage.

4. The right to privacy ceases upon the publication of the facts by the individual, or with his consent.

5. The truth of the matter published does not afford a defense. Obviously this branch of the law should have no concern with the truth or falsehood or the matters published.

6. The absence of “malice” in the publisher does not afford a defense.

With regard to remedies, a plaintiff may institute an action for tort damages as compensation for injury or, alternatively, request an injunction.

A closing point to make is that Warren and Brandeis recommend that criminal penalties be imposed for violations of the right to privacy, but they decline to elaborate further on the matter, deferring rather to the authority of the legislature.